Month: November 2023

A Brief Pause in Gaza but a Long War to Follow

We begin with the pause in the Gaza war and the exchange of prisoners with 50 hostages released, mostly women and children and foreign nationals, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Joining us to discuss how, in spite of the short lull in fighting, over 2 million people are still facing dire shortages of food, water, medical treatment, shelter and safety. Joining us is Robert Baer, one of the most accomplished agents in CIA history, and a winner of the Career Intelligence Medal. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude. He is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Middle East and is an intelligence and national security affairs analyst for CNN. His latest book is The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia.

On Thanksgiving Should We Be Thankful For an Improved Economy?

Then, with Thanksgiving approaching, we look into what we can be thankful for in terms of an improvement in the economy, and speak with Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive economic think-tank based in Washington DC. He is the author of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer, and writes the popular economics blog, “Beat the Press” where he has an article which we discuss, “Things About the Economy to Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving.”

Lesson For the Democratic Party From Spain Where a Fragmented Left Was Rebuilt to Now Hold Power

Then finally we go to Spain to look into similarities with the US in as much as Spain’s Civil War never ended, and neither did the American Civil War. Joining us is Toby Miller, a Professor of Journalism at the Universidad Complutense De Madrid in Spain as well as a Research Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are A COVID Charter, a Better World, Violence, The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture, and How Green is Your Smartphone? and we discuss, as a lesson for the Democratic Party, how the left in Spain self-destructed and fragmented then was rebuilt to now hold power.